AWwwwww…

I felt a little off yesterday morning and so worked from home. During the day, I updated one website, completed three short presentations, attended four telecons and ran two of them, and also completed the socks I was working on and began repeat three of the Icarus shawl. And cast on new socks in case I can’t do the lace knitting in the car. Not only is multitasking nice, but so is saving an hour and a half of commute time.

In other news, it’s been formally announced that I am this quarter’s Poet Laureate over at the Absolute Write writer’s forum. Part of that is that they ask you twenty questions, so here are the questions and my answers. And you’ll find one more sneaky announcement that I had been saving, along about #4.

1. When did you start writing poetry?

I’m really not sure. The first specific ones I remember were for a weekly creative writing class in 9th grade (public school; it was part of the Gifted program). At the start of each day we were assigned a topic and given the choice of writing an essay or a poem on it. I often chose the poem from sheer laziness; it seemed like a lot less work. I don’t have any of those now; if I did I think I’d find thoughtless word choices and lazy writing – but I bet they’d scan! I’d have been 14 in 9th grade; by then I was comfortable enough writing poetry that I think I had written some earlier but I don’t remember specific examples.

2. What other writing do you do regularly?

On the one side, a lot of my job is creating presentations and technical process documentation; on the other hand I’ve been blogging regularly since March 2001.

3. Do you think of yourself primarily as a poet?

Heck, no. I think of myself primarily as an engineer! Even though my current job is more management than engineering, once it gets into your thought processes it never gets out. Though it would probably be even truer to say that if I had to describe myself as one thing, it would be “I am a reader.”

4. Why do you write poetry?

These are the kinds of writing I get issued: poems and essays. Aside from some very rare murderously attacking plot bunnies, I don’t write fiction, much as I wish I could.

5. How does writing poetry relate with your other writing?

There are posts about poetry or including poems of my own from the first month of my blog. At one point I even went in and indexed all my blogged poems; this was n the days before blogging software made tagging or categorizing easy.

6. Beyond Absolute Write, what is your publication / performance history?

I’m so glad you asked 🙂 Especially because I give credit to AW for both motivation and some concrete information on where to look, and on what I’ve learned in crits for quality, I am very excited to answer this. (Very very excited. You have no idea – scratch that, you all probably do. And I’ve been saving the news for just this moment.) I received my first two acceptances for publication this spring. I even got paid for one.

One of them is already online, at a new journal called ExpatLit. Given where I am, I had to submit there! The other will be in the spring edition of Amaze Cinquain – I’m not sure when it will be online, as I think the print edition comes first.

7. How often do you write poems?

It varies, anywhere from every day to months between. I’m very susceptible to peer pressure, so I tend to write more often when hanging out at AW or elsewhere among writers. It also depends a lot on how many other demands there are on my attention – I write more when I’m bored.

8. What goals, if any, do you have for your poetry?

To get better at it; to say things and have people understand them.

9. Do you set out to write a poem, does it compel you to write it, or something else?

Sometimes poems jump me (vicious poem bunnies, cousin to the plot bunnies and far more frequent); sometimes there is something I want to say; sometimes I want to play with a particular form or conceit.

10. What formal, semantic, or thematic traits do you prefer to use in your poems?

I’m all over the map. I rarely write minimal, because I tend to be verbose (oh, you noticed?) but rhymed verse of all forms, non-rhymed, free verse. I like playing with alliteration and assonance, and using the same word in different ways. I tend to hear poems “out loud” in my head, so sound is important to me.

11. Which usually comes first: Topic/idea, form, words? Other?

Yes. (See question 9.) The ones that attack me fully-fleshed-out are the most fun to write, though I think some of the others come out as well in the end.

12. Do you revise? Right away, later on? How do you decide when you’ve finished with a poem?

Yes. I used to not do much, or not beyond the changes as I wrote it, but as I’ve gotten more interested in seeing how good I could get these poems, I’ve learned that even the ones that attack me fully formed can be improved.

13. How did you come to be interested in poetry?

My mom read it to me, as her father read it to her. A lot of kids’ books already are verse, of course, but she also the grown-up poets. We always had a couple of those “greatest poems” collections around.

14. What particular poem or poet first attracted you to poetry?

Apparently I had “The Night Before Christmas” memorized before age 3, which is pretty strange for a Jewish girl. (And I began to read at 3 or 4, so Mom would have had to read it to me.) Poe’s “Annabel Lee” was a favorite early on; I knew it was about a young girl dying, but don’t think I ever found it particularly spooky. Dr. Seuss, for the sound and the idea of having fun with words.

15. What poems, poets, movements or eras have influenced you as a poet: which do you particularly enjoy, admire, or aspire toward?

Mostly the formal ones. Shakespeare. John Donne. Pope. My stuff tends to be more head than heart, or a balance of both, so not the ROmantics. I have a perverse fondness for the balladeers of the Victorian age, like Kipling and Service (though I’d still say some of Kipling’s poems are of the highest rank). Their stuff rouses my blood, especially Service’s “Call of the Wild” – “Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost!” Among more modern poets, Millay, Frost, Mary Oliver. What I have called the “author poets”, like L.M. Montgomery or E. Nesbit or Christopher Morley – most of their poetry isn’t among the greats, but it’s good and worth reading. There are particularly a lot of good speculative poets right now, some of whom I can call acquaintances or in a few cases friends: Jo Walton, Suzette Haden Elgin. Elise Mattheson. Elizabeth Bear. Peg Duthie and others at Vary the Line. A few people right here on the AW forum. If the internet gives people a place to broadcast crap, it also allows transmission of a lot of gold that I might not otherwise get to see, and I love it for that.

16. What single poem of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read your work?

This is probably not what anyon else would pick, but one of the ones I’m proudest of is Deborah Milton Speaks. Because it’s totally unfair to ask a writer to pick just one brainchild, I’ll say that three that were a lot of fun for me are Song of a Wild Nebula, Will You come Dancing Tonight (wish I hadn’t blogged that one, so I could submit it) and the totally goofy Alice and Wendy and … and … but you asked for one.
(Note: you have to log in to see poems up for critique on AW. If you don’t feel like getting an account there, check the ‘poetry’ category here – a couple of the ones I cite are posted.)

17. What are your thoughts on poetry today: its function, future, direction, relevance?

People keep saying that poetry is dying. They’ve been saying that for the last two thousand years, and I don’t think it will be true until humanity dies out. We are a storytelling species, and poetry is a way to sharpen the story so that it pierces deeper.

18. What, in your view, makes a written/spoken work a poem?

In a novel, I’m told, every sentence needs to do at least two or three things, for instance advance the plot and also build a character or a world. In a poem, every word counts. I do not believe, as some do, that everything but nouns and verbs should be stripped out; sometimes, for instance, you need articles and conjunctions to give a natural conversational feel. A sonnet needs more kinds of words than a minimalist koan, just to let the rhythm carry it. An epic can’t be too starkly stripped or no one would ever get through it. But every word should be there for a reason, preferably more than one.

19. What do you like about your own poetry?

I think I have a decent feel for words and rhythms, and I hope that comes through. I like to juggle words, and I like to build detailed structures. I’m tickled if I can sneak in a pun or allusion – and five times more so if readers spot it.

20. What would you say to someone who wants to learn to write poetry well?

Read. Then read more. Read the kind of stuff you write, but read other kinds too; you might learn something else you want to do, or something you want not to do. And don’t be afraid; if you take your work seriously and yourself lightly, then the worst that can happen from writing. (In a free society, the worst that can happen from submitting is not that bad. But even the most brutally suppressed society cannot enchain the words you assemble in your mind.)